While working in Affiliate Marketing, sooner or later every affiliate faces the necessity of structuring and analyzing all the data he gets from his advertising campaigns. There is usually some statistics information you can get from the network you work with, but you can get more detailed and useful data by using special tracking software.

In general, tracking software is a technology used to track or manage marketing activities. It allows getting the information about clicks, views and impressions of advertising material within any online marketing activities. Firstly, let’s puzzle out how trackers work in general.

There are three main things you should now about tracking to understand how it works. The first one is about Database IDs. Every tracking runs on its own database, which generally is a massive amount of data. The first thing each tracker does is identifying users’ ID, then it will connect all the further information to this assigned ID. Later each request you do tracker will search exactly by an ID. For example, if you want to know the conversion rate for a desktop traffic, the tracker will search for all the IDs that used desktop. These IDs are called different things on different systems. Most of affiliate trackers call them either a “subid” or a “clickid”.

The second thing you need to know is about what is a GET request and how it works. The thing is that there are at least three systems involved into tracking: traffic source, affiliate tracker, and affiliate network. These systems have to pass the information back and forward all the time. However, there is an easy way to pass information back and forward on the Web – a GET request. The main aim of GET requests is to pass information to the web server running a URL which contains it.You can easily identify a Web URLwhich contains GET request – it’s everything after a “?” symbol in a Web address.GET requests have two parts: the name and the value of the information. You can also send multiple pieces of data, by using an “&” between the names of the information you want to send. That is how GET requests make the process of collecting data much easier.

The last, but not least thing is about Tokens. In case you don’t want to send the same information in your GET requests every time and you want it to differ by visitor, you’ll need tokens. To send a subid of each visitor instead of the same subid for all of them you just need to add a text that the tracker will identify and replace with theneeded information.These are called “tokens”, and they vary across all trackers, but mostly look roughly the same. They usually start and end with a symbol like { }, or [ ], or # # or any other variant. The text inside these symbols signals to the tracker that there is a piece of text needs to be replaced, so you can send a personal subid to each visitor.

Well, now you have an idea how trackers work.Different trackers have different features like: generating tracking codes, tracking time and location, tracking source, fraud detection and a lot of other depends on a concrete tracker.To help you out with this hard choice we decided to make a short review on the most popular trackers:

Voluum is one of the most expensive trackers, but it also gives wide statistic information. Tracker uses cloud technologies and has servers located all over the world that is why they have the fastest redirects and lowest click loss. Voluum also provide a high level of security, do mobile tracking as well as a web one and has a simple interface.

Adsbridge uses a secure cloud hosting, which makes a process of working with is very simple. Moreover, tracker offers a wide traffic distribution (more than 16 parameters), split-testing, pre-landers editor, multi-user access for affiliate teams and a lot of other useful features.

Octotrackerhas one of the most developed statistics data which gives you a lot of useful information. 100% tracking of COD-offers statuses, also there is no limit on amounts of traffic, except servers’ capacity. Moreover, Octotrackeridentifies not only frauds, but also non-qualified platforms, has split-testing and multicurrency support.

One of the best not very expensive trackers. Among other advantages there are fast setup and very simple interface. Redtrack statistics is not so wide as statistics which previous trackers have, but usually the information it gives is enough.

Keitaro is the best TDS service. TDS means Traffic Direction System, so Keitaro allows you to distribute traffic and work with targeting at the first place and to analyze it at the second place. Keitaro has a set of filters you can use to distribute a traffic, it also has split-testing and rotation function.